computer

All of the first computers were invented for military purposes in the nineteen forties and fifties. Once the war was over though, the second major role of the computer was in business. They were used at first for simple tasks like taking a census or monitoring minor activities in the finances of a business.
The first business computer was called UNIVAC1. UNIVAC1 was used for the first time in 1951 to take a United States census. This computer was invented by John Mauchly and J. Eckert. Together they founded and built the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. Theirs was the first computer to use a compiler and store programs. The United Kingdom was first introduced to business computers in 1953. These were called the Lyon Electronic Office computers, or LEO for short. LEO was first used by a restaraunt company for their accounting. The computer card shown below is an example of the kind that used to be used. It is life-size, and the numbers can be seen on it. These cards were used to put programs into computers. It would take one card just to execute a few simple commands. You can only imagine how long it took to put a whole program onto a computer.
By the year 1962, there were over ten thousand business computers in Western Europe alone. There were over forty thousand in the United States. In just one year, those numbers doubled. Now there are at least one hundred thousand business computers in the world. There were generally four major business applications for computers in the ninteen sixties and seventies. First, there was the computer "clerk." These computers would handle large amounts of repetitive clerical work. Most of the early business computers fit into the "clerk" category and many today still do. Second, computers were used as an information system. These computers would try to gather, predict, and store data. Because computers weren't very sophisticated back then, the technology used to provide such services wasn't able to give any real results. Because of this, companies that used these computers went out of business quickly. Third, there were the computers with the first drafting technonlogy. These computers were used for designing crude and small buildings or crude vehicles and aicraft. Finally, there were the computer "controllers." They were fed information which responded with programs that were already installed. The programs would help a computer decide on raising or maintaining certain information such as investing in stocks.
Business computers today may be used with information to rate the pollution in the air of a city or for reserving plane tickets from several different locations at once. However, modern computers are still used for determining merger decisions, architectual design, and the likeComputers have been around for quite a few years. Some of your parents were probably around in 1951 when the first computer was bought by a business firm. Computers have changed so rapidly many people can not keep up with changes.
One newspaper tried to relate how the fast changes in computer technology would look to a similar pace in the auto industry:
"Had the automobile developed at a pace (equal) to that of the computer during the past twenty years, today a Rolls Royce would cost less than $3.00, get 3 million miles to the gallon, deliver enough power to drive (the ship) the Queen Elizabeth II, and six of them would fit on the head of a pin!"These changes have occurred so rapidly that many people do not know how our modern computer got its start. The First Computing Machines "Computers" Since ancient times, people have had ways to deal with data and numbers. Early people tied knots in rope and carved marks on clay tablets to keep track of livestock and trade. Some people considered the 5000 year old ABACUS-- a frame with beads strung on wires to be the first true computing aid.
As trade and tax system grew in complexity, people saw that faster, more reliable and exact tools were needed for doing math and keeping records. In the mid-1600's, Blaise Pascal and his father, who was a tax officer himself, were working figuring and refiguring taxes that each citizen owed. Young Blaise decided in 1642 to build an adding and subtraction machine that could aide in such a tedious and time consuming process. The machine Blaise made had a set of eight gears that worked together much like an odometer keeps track of a car's mileage. His machine encountered many of problems. For one, it was always breaking down. Second, the machine was slow and extremely costly. And third, people were afraid to use the machine thinking it might replace their jobs. Pascal later became famous for math and philosophy, but he is still remember for his role in computer technology. In his honor, there is a computer language named Pascal. The next big step for computers arrived in the 1830's when Charles Babbage decided to build a machine to help him complete and print mathematical tables. Babbage was a mathematician who taught at Cambridge University in England. He began planning his calculating machine calling it the Analytical Engine. The idea for this machine was amazingly like the computer we know today. It was to read a program from punched cards, figure and store the answers to different problems, and print the answer on paper. Babbage died before he could complete the machine. However because of his remarkable ideas and work, Babbage is know as the Father of Computers. The next huge step for computers came when Herman Hollerith entered a contest given by the U.S. Census Bureau. The contest was to see who could build a machine that would count and record information faster. Hollerith, a young man working for the Bureau built a machine called the Tabulating Machine that read and sorted data from punched cards. The holes punched in the cards matched each person's answers to questions. For example, married, single, and divorces were answers on the cards. The Tabulator read the punched cards as they passed over tiny brushes. Each time a brush found a hole, it completed an electrical circuit. This caused special counting dials to increase the data for that answer.
Thanks to Hollerith's machine, instead of taking seven and a half years to count the census information it only took three years, even with 13 million more people since the last census. Happy with his success, Hollerith formed the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896. The company later was sold in 1911. And in 1912 his company became the International Business Machines Corporation, better know today as IBM.The First Electric Powered Computer What is considered to be the first computer was made in 1944 by Harvard's Professor Howard Aiken. The Mark I computer was very much like the design of Charles Babbage's having mainly mechanical parts, but with some electronic parts. His machine was designed to be programmed to do many computer jobs. This all-purpose machine is what we now know as the PC or personal computer. The Mark I was the first computer financed by IBM and was about 50 feet long and 8 feet tall. It used mechanical switches to open and close its electric circuits. It contained over 500 miles of wire and 750,000 parts. The first all electronic computer was the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). ENIAC was a general purpose digital computer built in 1946 by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. The ENIAC contained over 18,000 vacuum tubes (used instead of the mechanical switches of the Mark I) and was 1000 times faster than the Mark I. In twenty seconds, ENIAC could do a math problem that would have taken 40 hours for one person to finish. The ENIAC was built the time of World War II had as its first job to calculate the feasibility of a design for the hydrogen bomb. The ENIAC was 100 feet long and 10 feet tall.